All the entertaining villainy has the effect of making Andy’s quest – to shape her new role as Runway’s features editor into something truly worthwhile – look even duller, and her romance with nice-guy Peter (Patrick Brammall from Colin from Accounts) completely pointless.

It is a brash, funny, extravagant spectacle about sex and death, pain and pleasure, and – most of all – fashion. Milkmaid corsets, vintage Chanel, latex wedding dresses. Move over, Kate Bush. There’s a new Wuthering Heights look in town.

Crucially, the film is very funny, but like Alex (and Bishop), in a gentle, unprepared sort of way that feels like having good mates over for dinner.

H is for Hawk wants desperately to make you feel the raw blankness of grief and the healing power of nature, but in the end feels more like a kids’ wildlife documentary: beautiful but bloodless.

I’m not convinced that the heavy violence is entirely warranted, but the whole thing is at least unfailingly kitsch, and when the storylines merge they do so seamlessly.

It is a story of family and relationships, of life’s inevitabilities, and the surprises we can nonetheless carve from those. Its gut-wrenching despair is matched by a strange optimism, a powerful embrace of the possibilities of life and love that stays with you long after the end credits roll.

The film’s very last moments are perhaps a little saccharine, but honestly, by this point, you’ll forgive it anything. Supremely confident and stylish film-making that markets itself as big yet feels somehow small, in the sense that extraordinary care is paid to each scene, each modest conversation. Marty’s self-belief may sometimes be unearned, but this film’s absolutely isn’t.

Song Sung Blue’s best moments are when it focuses on its beautifully ordinary love story.

Goodbye June is preoccupied with sentiment in a way that might feel great for a two-minute Christmas ad, but just doesn’t work for an entire film. Still, Winslet is a confident director and Anders has an eye for relationships.

The film never rises above its clichés.

This film has the conversational dexterity and comedy of early Woody Allen films, the sadness of Lost in Translation, and the appealingly self-referential celebrity heft of Notting Hill. It is Baumbach, Sandler and Clooney at the top of their games, in a game where the audience is very much invited to play.

Melodramatic to the end, it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect home-watch film for cosy winter nights. Knives Out die-hards: we are back.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Part One, but this is still a highly entertaining display of what musical theatre can do on screen with top level performances and a true affection for the world-building.

This hybrid never feels quite cohesive enough, the pace somehow both rushed and yet too slow. One feels Vanderbilt’s panic at the enormity of the topic. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to admire.

Die My Love is simply too odd to appeal to everyone – but anyone familiar with the despair induced by listening on repeat to “I like to eat apples and bananas”, while wondering where their life, identity and bodily autonomy have gone, will find truth, if not solace, in its singularity.

Tár is a film of rare and wild excellence.

Glazer’s uncompromising and chilling vision of evil is unlike any other film about Nazism.

What the film does so well, though, is bring enormous compassion to a story that initially seems to despair for the world.

The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen in a performance that hits all the right beats, including some enjoyably sweaty, raspy musical set pieces (White sings the numbers himself), without ever elevating the role to anything greater.

Oscar Isaac is ideal as Dr Victor Frankenstein, a fevered, charismatic, and darkly obsessive oddball. He’s passionate and intense, driving the plot forward with powerful force.

This dazzling array of top tier actors have to spend most of their time discussing how bonkers the totally sane Lo seems, and so they never get past two-dimensional characterisation no matter how hard they try.

It manages to avoid cliché, making Kerr tender in one moment and dubious the next, smashing in doors and, at his worst in the throes of addiction, collapsing into sobs

The script for unconventional romantic comedy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey spent some time on Hollywood’s Black List, where well-liked but not yet picked up screenplays sometimes linger for years. It’s a shame it didn’t just stay there.

One Battle After Another is a film about legacy, about fathers and daughters, about the fight against an all-too-real American government hellbent on white supremacy, militarism, and oppression. Yet it also manages to be one of the most touching and absorbing thrillers of the year. Make no mistake: Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues may not have the brown M&M joke or cultish appeal of its original, but it gets great and lovable mileage out of just how good those first jokes were – mini-Stonehenge replica included. You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to think it was fantastic fun.

Honey Don’t! is another misfire, feeling bizarrely like an ersatz Tarantino. Given the Coens’ track record of making some of the smartest crime films in recent memory, it’s troubling how flat this one feels. I sincerely hope Ethan Coen hasn’t lost his knack.

Caught Stealing’s zany mix of comedy and drama tests your patience at times – though its crackerjack sexual tension is hard to argue with, and Austin Butler is a genuine, stop-and-take-notice screen presence. His charisma may well hold the whole inchoate package together, as he stammers and shrugs his way through the electric energy of the city.

It quickly becomes difficult to care about any of it.

The Thursday Murder Club never nails its tone, forever feeling like it’s still in rehearsal rather than down to the final edit.

Song’s point about the impact of class, economics, and the insidious, algorithmic approach to finding a partner feels like an accurate one. Love should be about risk-taking, not box-ticking; Lucy learns that soon enough, and seeing it play out is compelling.

With its well-observed, often darkly hilarious details of oddball inhabitants and chilling deployment of the chaotic overwhelm of social media in our lives, Eddington walks a thin line between dread and comedy.

There’s nothing new here and also a palpable reliance on enduring goodwill from the franchise’s existing fanbase, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. This is all such undemanding, carefree fun, delivering exactly what it promised, and simple without ever becoming simplistic.

There’s too much focus on disturbing the viewer rather than illuminating anything for them. Bring Her Back is a film that knows how to provoke, but not how to provide much insight.

It is a convincing, emotionally arresting, and visually appealing antidote to the complex muddle of so many recent superhero films.

The film feels limp, palpably too dependent on its source to emerge as its own thing. To convey the messages it wants to convey, it needed to work much harder to be more than just a pretty painting.

I salute Gunn, who was poached from Marvel, for trying to infuse this reboot with humour and vitality, dragging it out of a gloom that no longer suits viewers plagued by enough real-world problems.

Whether you’re a racing fan, have watched Netflix’s F1: Drive to Survive, or are a newcomer to the sport altogether, F1 uses old-fashioned, engine-revving storytelling.

Boyle still has an eye for suspenseful action, and much of it is breathtaking.

The fact is that the restrictions and judgements around single motherhood are only compounded by the harsh reality of class and privilege. Surrounded by more bureaucratic red tape than common-sense empathy, Molly often struggles – but through grit and determination, she reaches a foothold for her family that promises a better future.

Ballerina is actually great fun, a propulsive, pulpy gun-fu joy that revels in the things the early John Wick did so well: stunts and absurd world-building.

It’s a film that could do with a little more feeling overall – and more fury, too.

Made with Anderson’s typically droll tone, it’s often very funny and continually surprising.

There is monologuing, there is pacing the floor, there is possibly too much wordiness for what is ultimately a visual medium. But its characters and the performances are intriguing enough to keep the suspense going.

The Friend is a film that tells us that the only way out of heartache like this really is through. It may jump all over your bed and make you sleep on the floor, but weathering the hard part has its own kind of rewards.

Sinners is one of the most satisfying and fun blockbusters I’ve seen so far this year.

The twisty machinations are a bit too familiar, the pacing a tad too glacial before Odysseus’s revenge finally happens, the performances uniformly good but rather self-serious.

It’s a bog-standard, eat-the-rich message. But it does at least give the otherwise ridiculous unicorn story something to hang its horn on.

Even if the film can feel airless at times, with long, solid shots of the survivors’ banal everyday lives, it does have much to say on the foibles of mankind – and the way society may very feasibly backslide into, well, The End. That, to me, is worth giving a chance.

It’s great fun to watch two actors of such calibre play these wicked games of mistrust and deception – it’s even more fun to see Soderbergh handle his story so deftly.

Mickey 17 is a highly entertaining absurdist ride that embraces nihilism right up until the moment it tenderly skewers it.

The Monkey is surprisingly lacking in any good ideas. In fact, it’s the worst thing a horror film can be: boring.

There is a lot to garner from Anderson’s performance as a woman who has spent her life as the vessel of other people’s lust and projection; that is the main attraction of The Last Showgirl. But without the narrative scaffolding or depth to surround her character, Coppola’s film can often feel like a message in search of a movie.

Mad About the Boy is just enormously good fun.

This is a gnarly and fascinating thriller whose characters feel genuinely dangerous and unpredictable.

It’s a film about ordinary Londoners living ordinary lives and facing normal challenges, from mental health to domesticity. Baptiste is toweringly real: formidable and heartbreaking in her performance.

A work of staggering mystery and power, with an epic scope and a visual style to match, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is old school in the best possible sense.

This is not some deification story, even though it often regards Dylan’s capacity for musical storytelling with something akin to worship. Mangold steers the ship into harbour competently, even if I have some niggling questions about why the Dylan myth requires yet another movie.

You don’t have to profess any special interest in the subject to have a fantastic time at the cinema with Conclave, which is part political thriller, part catfight, and utterly compelling.

Obsessed by rooting his supernatural folk tales in the realities of historical life, Eggers turns Nosferatu into a gothic horror fairy-tale. It’s retro in the best sense of the word.

It is, indeed, exceedingly tasteful, but without any narrative oomph, and some problematic characterisation to boot.

Jenkins is the kind of talent who can turn his hand to almost anything and Mufasa is a respectable film as a result.

It rewards the viewer with a sense of the vast beauty – and sadness – a fleeting love affair might provide. It’s a brief thing, maybe, but it also lasts a lifetime.

I didn’t want this movie to be dull – I would have settled for enjoyably bad – but unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage that.

To enjoy Rumours you will have to accept that despite its opening, its aim is not The Thick Of It-style political skewering, but rather bonkers, absurdist nihilism. In the apocalypse, it turns out, nothing means much at all.

When Heller is metaphorically exploring the potentially horrifying physical transformation of pregnancy and post-partum life – and the personal sacrifices of identity, career, and self that women face when they become mothers – Nightbitch has a lot of smart, real things to say.

It fails to offer anything new and lacks the original’s fearless spirit. It’s not a dud, just a muted version of its forerunner, getting you where you want to go, just with less wind in its sails.

Joy doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it satisfyingly brings these stories to the screen in a typically prosaic, no-fuss British manner.

Paddington in Peru lacks the anarchic humour and originality that made its predecessors outstanding, but it’s all terribly merry nonetheless.

It joyfully expands on the source material with extended musical numbers and astute childhood flashbacks in a combination that will delight committed Ozians and newcomers alike.

Exhilarating, satisfying, classical with a touch of tongue-in-cheek: Gladiator II ticks all the boxes, and does it with panache.

A beautifully simple story of moral courage in the face of complicity, Small Things Like These is one of the best films of the year.

Mikey Madison gives a sparky, vulnerable, devastatingly real breakout performance as a strip-club dancer and sometime-sex-worker. Filmed with neon-lit nocturnal verve, Anora is as gorgeous to behold as it is deranged.

It is, all of it, glorious knockabout nonsense, a visual joy for kids, and exquisitely detailed for adults.

The patience and candid discomfort with which Almodóvar approaches it all feels fresh, the women’s relationship increasingly moving.

The film’s inability to find a single tone – comic, cathartic or otherwise – makes it feel like a failure on all fronts, and the constant intrusion of loud, obvious pop needle-drops (and even a full disco-dancing sequence) don’t help.

This film ripples with emotion. It is suffused with a sense of longing that lodges deep in its audience, even if we don’t always fully understand it.

A fresh Stephen King adaptation should be exciting. It’s a shame, then, that Salem’s Lot – a small-town vampire chiller set in 1970s Maine – has absolutely zero new ideas or even a particularly frightening take on the old story.

Glossy, grotesque, and intriguing even as you hate yourself for getting sucked into it, this isn’t an awful film. It just shouldn’t exist.

What a staggeringly stupid film. Joker: Folie à Deux is a sequel that did not need to exist. It’s an unspeakably self-indulgent, two-hour-plus beast of hodge-podge musical numbers wedged between drab prison and courtroom scenes.

Ronan’s performance holds our attention. She is astonishing in this role, able to harness both fragility and determination in equal measure. She dances alone as if exorcising demons from her body, pretends to conduct waves on the beach with unparalleled joy.

There’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment.